If you control the person’s reality, you control the person

A barefoot Buddha with dreadlocks, perched in a crazy fun house in the leafy hills of Berkeley, Lanier is a founding member of the digerati. The 57-year-old computer scientist, musician and writer has been christened the father of virtual reality.

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“The whole internet thing was supposed to create the world’s best information resource in all of history,” he says. “Everything would be made visible. And instead we’re living in this time of total opacity where you don’t know why you see the news you see. You don’t know if it’s the same news hat someone else sees. You don’t know who made it be that way. You don’t know who’s paid to change what you see. Everything is totally obscure in a profound way that it never was before."

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So what happens when fake news marries virtual reality?

“It could be much more significant,” Lanier says. “When you look at all the ways of manipulating people that you can do with just a crude thing like a Facebook feed — when people are just looking at images and text on their phones and they’re not really inside synthetic worlds yet — when you can do it with virtual reality, it’s like total control of the person. So what I’m hoping is that we’re going to figure this stuff out so  ..

Read more at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/61572041.cms

EDIT: I stopped using Facebook, Whatsapp more than 3 years ago. My twitter account is connected to vfmdirect.in only for automatic republishing of my blog posts. For all practical purposes, I am "dead" on social media.